VSTP: vessel spatio-temporal contact pattern detection based on MapReduce

Abstract Due to lack of the coverage of 3G/4G network, satellite communication which costs excessively is the main approach used in ocean to provide network service. Ocean mobile delay tolerant network (OMDTN) can provide low-cost data transmission service in the network by utilizing the contact chances of moving vessels. Spatio-temporal contact pattern is one of the key metrics to improve the efficiency of the routing algorithm in OMDTN. Some researches have been carried out on human handheld device and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, the vessel’s trajectory data is distributed and stored disorderly, which makes traditional contact pattern detection algorithm cannot be directly applied. In this paper, we design a parallel algorithm named VSTP based on MapReduce to detect spatio-temporal contact pattern from trajectories of over 2000 vessels. Studying the vessels’ trajectories and the contact records, we observe that the vessels’ contact pattern including inter-contact time distribution and contact times distribution is in sharp contrast to the study on human handheld device and VANETs. Our results can provide the guidelines for the design of data routing protocols on OMDTN and give a new solution to overcome the difficulty of ocean network coverage.